no scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,—who, whatever else he was, must be admitted even by unbelief to have set his mark upon mankind more deeply than any other son of men. Yet how he emerges upon the world out of secrecy and silence! Whatever bright cloud of hope and prophecy had formerly floated about his cradle, has long been scattered and forgotten; and he comes, from his Galilean hills, one of the simple folk who earned their bread in the sweat of their brow, unlearned save in the ancestral wisdom of his people, unheralded but by the village estimate of a sweet and innocent life, to finish the work of a long line of prophets, and to lift humanity nearer to God. And we are often so eager to prove the singularity of his mission, and to take him out of the category of other workers for God, as to miss the great lesson which is to be learned of the way in which the Father always trains and educates a faithful and victorious Son. Of his mother, who knows anything, save what the few hints and statements of the Evangelists disclose? A superstition, not without its tender and graceful side, has taken her from her cottage home at Nazareth, and crowned her Queen of Heaven; till all the familiar extravagances of mythology have obliterated even from men's imagination the lines of a sweet and strong human character. And yet what a marvellous woman must have been this unknown mother of Christ! What depth of tenderness, what steadiness of judgment, what a majestic and yet winning purity, what a faculty of self-devotion (not yet too hardly tried), what a simple intensity of devoutness, must have watched and helped the child, as he grew and blossomed into man! What airs from heaven must have blown about that lowly roof, filling all who dwelt beneath it with a noble simplicity of content with their own lot, and one, with a nobler discontent with the world's innumerable wrongs and sufferings! These were God's quiet ways, and the very record of them has disappeared; they survive only in their result. But there is no son in whom mother's blood does not flow, and though now we know not how or where, the Mary of whom the world is ignorant, lived and spoke and died in the Christ, to whom the world looks up.

So no mistake can be greater than to suppose that all the world's best work is done by the eloquent tongue and the busy hand. I will not compare what may be achieved by these means, with the less conspicuous results of a goodness which propagates itself less by word and act than by the unconscious contagion of example; for it is not given to us to choose the form and method of our obedience. The call of conscience is to action; God cannot be acceptably served in inglorious ease. The command comes in many forms: "Work while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work," cries one voice; and then another, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might;" and again a third, "The fields are white unto harvest, but the labourers are few." But God Himself provides a diversity of work for His own purposes, and at the same time a variety of example for us, when He chooses some lives, and laying upon them, what seems to be a heavy burthen of sickness and infirmity, or filling them with a great modesty and retiringness of spirit, or shutting them up within very narrow and insurmountable barriers of circumstance, says to them, in a voice which it is impossible to misinterpret, "Serve Me in darkness and in silence; and let it be enough that I accept the faithfulness which is unknown of men." Sometimes a command like this finds a ready echo in a timid and sensitive spirit, to which it is a deliverance not to be compelled by conscience to go down into the throng of life; quite as often it lies,